After the Civil War, Emily Dickinson's poetic tide ebbed, but she sought increasingly to regulate her life by the rules of art. Her letters, some of them equal in artistry to her poems, classicize daily experience in an epigrammatic style. For example, when a friend affronted Dickinson by sending a letter jointly to her and her sister, she replied: “A Mutual plum is not a plum. I was too respectful to take the pulp and do not like a stone.” By 1870 Dickinson dressed only in white and saw few of the callers who came to the homestead; her seclusion was fiercely guarded by her devoted sister. In August 1870 Higginson visited Amherst and described Dickinson as "a little plain woman" with reddish hair, dressed in white, bringing him flowers as her “introduction” and speaking in a “soft frightened breathless childlike voice.”
Her later years were marked with sorrow at the deaths of many people she loved. The most prostrating of these were the deaths of her father in 1874 and her eight-year-old nephew Gilbert in 1883, which occasioned some of her finest letters. She also mourned the loss of Bowles in 1878, Holland in 1881, Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882, Otis P. Lord in 1884, and Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885. Lord, a judge from Salem, Massachusetts, with whom Dickinson fell in love about 1878, had been the closest friend of her father. Dickinson's drafts of letters to Lord reveal a tender, mature love, which Lord returned. Jackson, a poet and popular novelist, discerned the greatness of Dickinson's poetry and tried unsuccessfully to get her to publish it. --David J.M. Higgins
